For Some Parents, Leaving a Private School Is Harder Than Getting In

In February 2011, Nicole Smolowitz’s son was admitted to the Mandell School on the Upper West Side. She signed a contract and paid the $7,500 deposit.

By late April, the family’s financial situation had changed, and private school was no longer an option. Ms. Smolowitz called the school to say her son would not be able to attend. She did not expect to get her deposit back — but she was told she had to pay the remaining $26,250, as well.

“It’s April,” she said she told them. “I will find someone for you to take my child’s spot.” The school told her that was not how things were done. Then, in September, Mandell sued.

For most parents, getting their child into a private school is a moment of joy, or at least relief. But uncomfortable conversations take place at this time of year, as some parents reconsider.

Since 2009, at least four private schools in New York City — Mandell, Friends Seminary, Claremont Prep (now Léman Manhattan Preparatory School), and the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School — have sued parents for tuition.

The schools’ argument is simple: Parents sign a contract when they accept placement, saying they will send their child to the school the next year and pay the agreed-upon price.

Parent-oriented Web sites like UrbanBaby.com are now filled with anxious questions about how far schools will go to enforce those contracts.

The contractual deadline at which a family is on the hook for a year’s tuition varies: at Mandell, it is in March; at Riverdale Country School, it is May 31; and at the Trinity School, it is in July. If parents withdraw their children before the deadline, they lose only their deposit, usually several thousand dollars. Typically, parents must sign a new contract each school year.

While financial strain is an oft-cited reason for parents withdrawing their children from private schools, another factor is the availability of public gifted-and-talented programs. Often, the deadline for parents to commit to a private school comes before the city’s Education Department sends acceptance letters for the gifted programs, which it is expected to do this year in late May.

Lawsuits are not the only tool available to schools: some parents have reported being threatened with debt collectors, leading many to cave and pay for an education their child will not receive. And defending a lawsuit is often not financially worthwhile, as the cost of a lawyer can approach the amount the school is demanding.

Frances Langbecker said she was shocked when Friends Seminary sued her after her daughter had been there for six years, especially because she had been a class parent and an active fund-raiser for most of that time.

In 2008, Ms. Langbecker was working in real estate, and her husband was starting a company. Because of the financial crisis, she had her daughter, Isabella, apply to New Explorations Into Science, Technology and Math, or NEST+m, a selective public school on the Lower East Side. When Isabella was accepted days after Friends’s back-out deadline, she said, she called Friends to say that while she did not think Isabella would attend NEST+m, they planned to go to the orientation to check it out.

According to Ms. Langbecker, while she and her husband were still deciding where to send Isabella, the principal of Friends sent Isabella a letter saying he was sorry to see her go.

Then Friends sued for $28,700. According to the school’s court filings, the Langbeckers had withdrawn Isabella after the back-out date. “It was ugly, bad, devastating,” Ms. Langbecker said. “The Friends community was my community.”

In their own court papers, the Langbeckers said Friends had let other parents back out and questioned whether the lawsuit fit with the school’s Quaker principles. They also said the school had not kept up its end of the contract because it had failed to deliver a quality education at times, like when certain math and English teachers were out. Ultimately, Ms. Langbecker said, both sides dropped the case. David Black, the lawyer for Friends, did not return calls for comment.

While doing research for the suit, Ms. Langbecker came upon another case that gave her hope: the Gunderson case, as families who have been sued call it.

In 2007, Erik Gunderson and Sarah Brooks enrolled their son for another year at Park West Montessori School, a preschool on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They put down a deposit of $4,700 of the $19,300 tuition.

Soon afterward, Ms. Brooks was offered a tenure-track position at a university in Virginia. When she told the school that her family was moving, the school said she had to pay the remaining tuition, according to the lawsuit. Her father, Russell Brooks, a lawyer at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, represented her in court, and won a ruling forcing Park West to turn over records showing that it would be financially harmed by his daughter’s decision to withdraw her son.

“They had no damages,” Mr. Brooks said. “The entire contract amount — the deposit amount plus what they were seeking — would be a windfall to them, because they could fill up the spot in the class from the waiting list.”

Kathy Roemer, executive director of Twin Parks Montessori Schools, which includes Park West, said the Gundersons’ deposit had not been refunded. The court denied the school’s counterclaim for the remaining tuition, and while Dr. Roemer called that ruling “contrary to basic contract law,” the school did not pursue the case because “the amount was too small.”

Since the Gunderson case, other parents, including Ms. Langbecker, have used the same defense, arguing that schools must prove they have been hurt financially. It is unclear how successful this argument is, as many cases are settled out of court.

Gabriella Rowe, head of the Mandell School, said the matter was not so simple.

Ms. Rowe said that by custom, private schools were not supposed to dip into their waiting lists after the enrollment deadline had passed. Otherwise, she said, there would be a free-for-all of families canceling on one school to move to another, making it hard for schools to plan for the next year.

“If someone says, ‘Oops, sorry, we decided our twins are going somewhere else,’ that’s $70,000 that had a place to be spent on financial aid, or for a teacher salary, or for running the school,” she said. She declined to comment specifically on the Smolowitz case, which was settled out of court; neither party would say for how much. Ms. Rowe said she tried to work with families who opted for gifted and talented programs since the schedule was out of everybody’s control.

Shamir A. Khan, a clinical psychologist and founder of the N.Y.C. Private Schools Blog, said parents should read their contracts carefully and assume that schools will enforce the terms.

“Families should create a detailed paper or electronic record documenting when and how their circumstances changed and the school’s response,” Dr. Khan said. “But at the end of the day, a breach is a breach, and parents should be prepared to pay the full amount.”

Correction: May 9, 2012

Because of editing errors, an article in some editions on April 30 about New York City private schools that sued parents over tuition erroneously included one school among those that filed lawsuits and referred imprecisely to a case filed by another school. Léman Manhattan Preparatory School has not taken such legal action against parents. And while York Preparatory School has sued parents over tuition, those cases do not involve parents who withdrew their children from school. (The issue of students having been withdrawn is included in lawsuits filed against parents by Mandell, Friends of Seminary, and the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School.)

A version of this article appears in print on April 30, 2012, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: For Some Parents, Leaving a Private School Is Harder Than Getting In. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe